


Still Beating

by dancinguniverse



Category: True Detective
Genre: M/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 19:59:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1359925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinguniverse/pseuds/dancinguniverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-series, Marty and Rust pick up the pieces. It's a slow process.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Beating

Marty takes it slow, but even so he’s starting to regret helping Rust with his jailbreak. His face tightens with every little jolt of the car, and he’s too fucking quiet. Marty almost makes a joke of it, but he looks over and Rust’s eyes are closed, mouth a flat, pained line. Marty keeps his thoughts to himself. The jouncing the car takes as Marty pulls into his neighborhood makes Rust grunt, but at least then they’re done. Marty opens Rust’s door, and swings Rust’s bare legs out for him.

“Ready?” he asks shortly, and Rust nods, grips his arm and lets himself get leveraged out of the car. He ends up panting, clinging to Marty’s shoulder, and Marty gives him a minute to catch his breath. He should call Maggie. He should maybe just shove Rust back in the car and go back to the hospital, but he knows he won’t.

After a minute, Rust loosens his hold and looks around. “Where—“ he stops, swallows. “Your place?”

Marty rolls his eyes, and turns Rust towards his front steps. “Yeah, genius, my place. I broke you out, I’m not gonna leave you to fester and mope in that shithole you got behind the bar.”

Rust doesn’t reply, which is as good a sign as any that Marty made the right call in bringing him here—or, you know, the wrong one in helping him leave the hospital early at all.

It takes them a while but they finally get inside, and Marty pushes Rust in towards his bed, setting him down carefully. The sheets aren’t clean but they’re not dirty either, and it’s not like Rust has any grounds to tell off another man for his housekeeping skills. “Stay put,” he tells him. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He steps back into the kitchen and calls Maggie. “What happens if a man doesn’t so much check out of a hospital as just leave?” he asks her after a brief greeting. “It was his idea.”

“Of course it was,” she sighs. “I don’t suppose you know what drugs they had him on?”

Marty answers as many of her questions as he can, scribbles down some instructions Maggie gives him, and promises to have Rust check in with the hospital again in the morning. He’ll have to go back in eventually anyway, unless he wants those stitches in there permanently.

He goes into his bathroom cabinet, fishing out the pain pills leftover from his own hospital stay. He shakes one into Rust’s hand and slaps his other away when he reaches for the bottle. “You don’t trust me?” Rust drawls, voice slurred a little with pain and fatigue.

Marty snorts. “Yeah, I wanna hand heavy narcotics to a guy who’s recently described himself as scented meat that just hasn’t gotten around to shuffling itself off the mortal coil.”

Rust squints at him. “What?”

“Fuck if I know. Go to sleep. You want some pants?”

“Fuck it,” Rust mumbles, and slowly lowers himself onto the pillows. He needs Marty’s help to swing his legs up onto the bed. “In the morning.”

“Yeah. You yell, you need something.” Marty flicks the light off as he leaves, and settles himself into the recliner in his living room. He’d slept there anyway his first few nights back from the hospital. It had been too hard to find a comfortable position laying down. He stays awake for a while, waiting to see if Rust will sleep, but the drugs do their job, and all he hears from the bedroom is deep breathing. Eventually Marty too falls asleep, and is woken only by the sun streaming in through the blinds.

* * *

Rust stays with him for two days, three, and by then he’s mostly mobile, at least for the simpler tasks in life, and starts to make noise about getting out of Marty’s hair. Marty chews his lip.

“I don’t mean to sound like somebody’s mother here,” he states. Rust just stares at him until Marty looks away, rubbing the back of his neck. “Seems to me,” he says slowly, “like one of the bonuses of your getting stabbed in the gut was a forced dry out. Don’t seem likely to stick, if I drop you back off to living in a bar.”

That’s as far as Marty can go. He can’t say that it bothers him to think of Rust falling off the wagon again, that he likes this version of Rust with eyes that aren’t dead and scary as hell, that he doesn’t mind Rust taking up his bed and half his space, because less than three weeks ago he thought he was watching the man die in his arms, and he’s not over yet how a weight lifts off his chest every time he sees Rust up and about. He stares at his wall, and hopes Rust gives half a shit about his life these days, because God help him, but Marty does.

Now it’s Rust who looks away, studying the building across the street that is the view from Marty’s front windows, nodding slowly as he thinks. “Might be right,” he says finally. But that’s all he says on the matter, and eventually Marty gathers his keys and heads into the office to catch up.

When he gets home, he catches Rust going through the classifieds with a pen in his mouth, circling apartments and jobs. “No rush,” he says casually, and Rust cocks his head skeptically.

“You like having a roommate after all these years?”

“Maybe I like the company,” Marty suggests.

Rust snorts, and goes back to his paper. “How’s the private eye business?” he asks.

Marty folds his arms. “Might be expanding.”

Rust shakes his head, but when Marty glances over again, he’s sketching doodles around the classifieds, blotting out most of the job options. Marty finds himself whistling as he sorts through the fridge for dinner, and the next day he leaves some of his casework where Rust can find it. It’s been piling up anyway, so he can use the help.

* * *

At first Rust sleeps most of the time. The drugs he’s on help, as does the fact that even a mind as crazy as his has to cave to a body still trying to repair a six inch gash torn through its middle. But as his body heals and his dosages go down, Marty notices the light in the bedroom staying on later and later, and Rust beats him up most mornings. Rust is quiet, though. He picks over Marty’s single bookshelf or steals Marty’s laptop or the work he brings home, and some nights Marty hears the soft skritch of pencil on paper, knows that Rust is adding to the ledger, which he’s noticed has started holding sketches as well as Rust’s notes and musings.

The hospital had objected to Rust’s early departure, and sent reams of instructions after him. He has physical therapy that he seems to follow, but which Marty keeps an eye on nonetheless. One morning, after a night where as far as Marty knows, the light in his room—now Rust’s, for the time being—never went off, he notices Rust starting his stretches, only to sit back again after a bare minute and light up a cigarette, jaw a tight line.

Marty glances up from his email. “Quitting already?”

“Fuck you,” Rust snarls, vicious. “Get the fuck out of my face, Marty.”

“Where you want me to go, considering you're a guest in my house?”

Rust covers his face with one hand. “Then dump me somewhere, I don’t give a shit.”

Marty closes the lid on his laptop. “When was the last time you slept, man?” Rust shakes his head. “Come on, you’re getting better, it’s just a slow ride.”

“What the fuck do you know?” Rust spits at him.

Marty gives him the room. He puts Rust’s next round of meds in a glass by the bedside table, and hides the remainder.

* * *

Maisie calls him a few times after the hospital, but then the calls taper off, and they’re back to radio silence. Marty’s glad to hear her voice, but the more they talk, the more he realizes he doesn’t know his little girl at all. He’s patted himself on the back for years about remembering her birthday, about her calling him on Christmas, and he wonders how he fooled himself into thinking that was enough. He calls Audrey, wants her to tell him about her life. The conversation is stilted.

“I’m sorry,” he says, when the words dry up again between them. “I—I love you honey. I thought letting your mom take you girls was best. I didn’t mean to stop being your dad. Going through… what I did… it makes you think about things. I’d like to be a part of your life, if I can.”

Audrey’s silence is pained. “You stopped being our dad a long time before the divorce,” she tells him, and it hurts all the more because she doesn’t sound mean, she just sounds… tired. More tired than a girl her age should, and it makes Marty ache, but he doesn’t know how to make it better, never did. “I’m sorry for what happened, and I hope you feel better, but I can’t help you with that. I’ve got my own stuff I’m dealing with. Can you understand that?”

Marty swallows. “Yeah, honey. Course I can. If I can ever help though, you call me, okay?”

There’s a pause on the line. “Okay,” she says. He knows she won’t.

* * *

One morning Marty wakes up to the smell of coffee, hears the comforting drip and rumble of the brewer, and he stretches on the couch, feeling more relaxed than he has in weeks. Maggie used to get up before him, make the coffee every morning. It’s the sound and smell of something right with the world, first thing in the morning. He stumbles into the kitchen, still yawning from sleep, and Rust holds a mug out to him wordlessly.

Marty’s hands close around the mug, pleased and a little surprised. Considerate has never been a choice word to describe his partner. “I like you a lot more now than I did the first time around,” Marty says, only sort of honestly. Truth is, it’s easier to like Rust these days, but Marty liked him just fine back in the day, against his own better judgement.

Rust honest to God smiles at him. “No one else liked me at all,” he points out, and it could have sounded like self-pity except they both know it’s true.

Marty pats Rust’s shoulder as he moves past him towards the bedroom. “Gonna take a shower.”

“You want eggs when you get out?”

“God bless you,” Marty says, heartfelt.

* * *

Marty drives Rust back to the hospital to get his stitches removed. They’re on the way back when Rust shifts in the passenger seat. “You mind stopping off somewhere?”

Marty glances over, eases up on the gas. “What you got in mind?”

Rust grimaces. “Hair keeps getting in my face. I can’t reach around to put it back.”

Marty grins, and switches lanes for the turn. “No arguments here, buddy.”

“Thanks.”

Marty glances over again. “And while you’re at it, that stache ain’t doing your face no favors neither.”

Rust flips him off without looking away from the window. He has the barber shave his face clean.

* * *

Marty listens to Rust a lot. He listens to his still crazy ramblings about whatever tickles his fancy, and he listens when Rust is quiet. At first, he listens in case the fool decides to fall over going to the bathroom by himself and rip his stitches out and bleed to death, and then later, he listens in case the return of the insomnia brings back other demons for company. Christ knows the man’s earned his share of bad dreams.

But in the end it’s Marty who wakes up the in the dark of the night shaking and shouting. It’s not the first time his nightmares have led him back down into Carcosa, lost among the grotesquely arranged bodies, devil’s traps twisting up taller than his head. In the center of the maze it’s Rust wearing the crown of antlers and twigs, body naked and bloody, limbs splayed unnaturally, and Marty is lost in the darkness.

There’s a hand on his arm, and Marty flails wildly, comes back to himself with Rust’s voice murmuring to him, Rust’s hands holding him down gently. “Easy,” Rust is saying, voice low in that steady way he has. “Easy, Marty, just a dream.”

Marty shakes him off and Rust lets him, raising his hands. “Alright?” Rust asks softly.

Marty can’t answer, puts a fist to his mouth in a desperate attempt not to break down. He shoves his way past Rust, goes over to the window where the sky is just beginning to go pearly with pre-dawn light. He breathes like a man trying not to drown, and maybe that’s what he is. He’d left the force to escape exactly the kind of shit they’d gone searching for, and it seems like the darkness is always waiting, at the edges of everything. Marty puts on a good show, but he doesn’t know how to manage the monster that lives inside him now. He knows now why Rust is the way he is. He understands not sleeping, contemplating the darkness most people don’t even know exists. He can’t get away from it. He doesn’t realize Rust has followed him until there’s a hand on his shoulder.

Marty sucks in a breath and tries to pat Rust’s hand, ends up hanging onto it like it’s for dear life. Rust lets him. After a minute Marty gets control of himself, wipes his face, and takes a long breath. The sun still isn’t up, but the sky is light already, silvery grey with a hint of pink to the east. Rust drops his hand, but stays close, their shoulders brushing. Marty’s glad for the contact.

He clears his throat, fishing for something to break the silence. “So how’re you doing?” he asks, voice cracked but holding. Then he laughs at himself, one choking huff of breath, because what the fuck. What the fuck.

He can feel Rust looking at him, but he stares determinedly out the window. After a minute Rust shifts around to stand in front of him. He slides his hand up Marty’s arm to his shoulder, the base of his neck. He leans in slowly, eyes intense, and Marty could pull away at any time, but he doesn’t. Rust kisses his mouth, eyes sliding closed at the last second, and Marty doesn’t kiss him back, because again, what the fuck, except that yeah, obviously this is where they’ve been heading, probably for longer than Marty wants to think about.

Rust’s mouth is light, hand almost casual on his neck, like they just happen to be standing nose to nose, swapping spit, and that’s messed up, so Marty puts his hands to Rust’s shoulders, presses him back against the wall, and kisses him like it means something. Rust’s fingers dig into Marty’s neck, the short hair at the back of his head. Marty’s body feels strung tight, not quite aroused but electrified, like the wrong touch might shatter him. After a minute they’re both breathing hard, and Marty draws back just a fraction, bumping their noses together.

Rust draws in a ragged breath, eyes a little wild, and chokes out an echo. “How’re you doing?” Marty’s glad he’s not the only one now who sounds wrecked, but he can’t reply, doesn’t know what the hell to say, just breathes through his nose.

After a minute Rust pulls back, rubs his thumb over Marty’s cheekbone. "Yeah," he says softly. He brushes past Marty into the kitchen, and a few minutes later Marty hears the coffee maker start to rumble. The sun is up.

* * *

They don’t talk about it, but sometimes after that Rust drags his hand over Marty’s shoulder when he passes by, and Marty feels the touch like a burn. Marty is aware that he had gotten more handsy with Rust. Just little things—a hand to his hip when the kitchen’s too crowded, a clap on the shoulder or knee, just because. When you’ve held a man’s guts inside his body for him, your personal boundaries get a little rearranged, is all, and there was some necessity to it when Rust was fresh out of the hospital. He shies away from it for a few days after that morning they don’t talk about. But hell, Rust still can’t tie his shoes without help, so the wariness fades pretty quickly. Rust doesn’t kiss him again though. Marty does his best not to think about it.

* * *

Rust moves out, gets himself a little one bedroom, not that different from the place he’d had the first time. It’s another month before either of them are supposed be doing any heavy lifting, so Marty passes the word around to some friends, old colleagues. After the way it all went down Rust isn’t the pariah he used to be, so it’s not too hard to get someone to stop by Rust’s old place to pick up his mattress and pick him up a damn bedframe, throw his stack of books and meager kitchen supplies—man owns one damn set of cutlery, who wants to wash a spoon that often—into a box and cart them over. A few days later, an underused couch gets cleared out of somebody else’s basement and dropped off.

Marty stops by a few times that first week. Rust isn’t any less weird now, that’s for damn sure, but he’s tending less to the dismal and macabre, which can only be to the good. He buys a bookshelf and some more kitchen things all on his own. Marty’s tentatively hopeful about each stupid accomplishment, because they’re signs that Rust is digging in, here to stay. He won't commit to the PI business yet, but Marty's hopeful. He goes by after work sometimes, brings a pizza or takeout, and listens to Rust ramble about philosophy or fishing boats or physics, whatever the fucking theme of the night is.

“You ever just watch football?” Marty asks. It’s probably a non sequitur, but he can’t honestly be sure, since he has no idea what the fuck Rust has been talking about for the last ten minutes.

“You think mankind doesn’t compete against itself every day for power, sex, money, just the right to survive? Why does watching a bunch of overpaid, overhyped men compete for a statistic, maybe a trophy and some bragging rights, become an obsession for so many people?”

Marty sucks on his teeth, wondering why he keeps doing this to himself.

* * *

The next time he comes over, Rust is making spaghetti from a jar, and there’s a little twenty inch TV set blaring away with the night’s college game, and it plays while they eat. Marty is delighted. Of course, after dinner Rust pulls his ledger across his knee and starts sketching, tuning out the TV completely. Marty glances over repeatedly, every time to find Rust totally engaged in his notebook. Can’t the son of a bitch just watch a football game? Finally he snaps, “Is this disturbing you?”

Rust doesn’t even look up. “Nope.”

“Would you like me to leave?” he asks in the same tone.

Rust’s pen doesn’t even hesitate in its lazy scrawl across the page. “Nope.”

Marty shakes his head and goes back to the game. Baby steps.

* * *

Marty’s making soup. He wasn’t lying to Maggie; he’s trying to clean his life up, eat a little healthier, and some of that is eating less out of cans and cardboard boxes. He has some shrimp and tomatoes, some spices (he has a spice rack these days), vegetables and rice, and he’s squinting at his laptop screen, trying to figure out if there’s any particular order to this thing when there’s a knock at his door.

He opens it to find Rust holding a white cardboard container. “I brought dessert,” Rust offers, standing on the far edge of the front step like he might bolt.

Marty’s stopped by Rust’s place a dozen times at this point and Rust hasn’t set foot in Marty’s since he moved out, but Marty just grins and swings the door open wider, backing up to gesture Rust in. “I’m trying something here,” he admits. “Don’t know how well it’s going to pan out, but you’re welcome to whatever it is.”

Rust peels the shrimp, and by then Marty’s pretty sure he’s got the recipe figured out. It ain’t the Cordon Bleu, but it’s decent. After dinner they end up out back, catching the breeze. There’s rain on the wind, and it’ll storm soon. Rust is quiet tonight, and that ain’t always a bad thing, but Marty’s got an itch under his skin, and the quiet isn’t suiting him.

Rust cants one hip against the porch rail and lights up a cigarette. Marty doesn’t smoke anymore, but he plucks this one from Rust’s fingers and takes a drag. Rust levels him a look and pulls out another.

“Can I ask you something?” Marty says, before he’s finished thinking it through.

Rust raises his eyebrows at him.

“You figure us hanging out like this is more crazy or less, considering how we’re both kind of fucked up?”

Rust sucks on his cigarette. “Everyone’s fucked up, Marty.”

“Yeah, but you add together your crazy and mine, I don’t know that’s a healthy combination, you see?”

Rust looks at him expressionlessly for a moment, then back to the yard. “It don’t add,” he says, after a long moment. “Ain’t that simple. There’s good, and bad, and none of it cancels, it’s just all there at the same time, swirling around together.”

Marty takes a long drag on his cigarette, then stubs it out. “You know what bothers me more than your eternal opposition to giving a fucking straight answer to a question?”

Rust’s mouth quirks. “What’s that?”

“When I understand your nonsense.” He takes Rust’s cigarette from his fingers and grinds it beneath his heel, takes Rust by the front of his shirt and kisses him. His other hand settles on Rust’s hip, fingers grazing the waistband of his jeans. Rust’s hands come up, just barely ghosting over Marty’s shoulders. He kisses like he smokes, like he needs it to breathe. He inclines his head to suck at Marty’s jaw, his throat. Marty’s eyes are closed.

“Can we be not crazy about this?” he asks.

Rust draws back, hands coming up to cup Marty’s face, trace the line of his jawbone. “How do you mean?”

Marty slides his hand lower, fingering the seams on Rust’s back pockets, and watches him swallow slowly. “I mean, I’m acknowledging the fact that we are fucked up people. But can this be about two people who happen to be fucked up, and not that we’re doing this because we’re fucked up?”

Rust’s eyes darken. “Yeah. We can do that.” He lowers his head, curls his tongue around Marty’s earlobe, and Marty sucks in a breath.

“You—“ Rust moves closer, cups Marty through his jeans, and Marty’s breath hitches. “You good to go? With your stomach, I mean?”

“Fuck yes,” Rust breathes, “Unless you got some surprise acrobatic moves I don’t know about.”

Marty grins. “Boy, you don’t know me. Get the fuck inside.”

* * *

A week later, Marty picks Rust up at his door. He’s got a friend’s boat for the day, and he’s taking Rust fishing. Rust is in a chatty mood, so Marty rolls the windows down, lets the wind take most of his words away. Rust just talks louder.

“Did you know there are bacteria that live in sulfur vents with no light at all, just chemicals and heat and pressure enough to crush you to death. But they take that energy and keep on reproducing, making little copies of themselves. It’s the closest to a literal version of hell you’re ever likely to see, but there’s life there. Just… doing its thing.” Rust stares out at the Louisiana countryside as it rolls past.

Marty side eyes him. “I did not know that,” he says, waiting to see where Rust is going with this. Rust is quiet for another moment before he picks up again.

“This whole planet was a toxic wasteland, a lifeless hunk of rock until some living things smaller than you or I can see decided they didn’t like the look of the place and started redecorating. Added oxygen, poisoned themselves on it almost to death—a few times—until some other little microbe took over, and they all stumbled along, completely blind to their purpose, until a few billion years later, here you and I are, enjoying the fruits of their labors." He taps his lips. "Hell of a thing to accomplish by a random walk,” he finishes softly.

Marty taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “Are we supposed to be some kind of algae in this thought exercise of yours?”

Rust looks over, looking surprised. “I’m saying life, Marty. Life just… keeps on going.”

Marty nods and keeps driving, the sun hot and bright overhead.


End file.
